Online or remote shopping has grown immensely over the past decade. Remote shopping offers many benefits including allowing customers to shop from literally anywhere in the world, eliminating the costs associated of having to ship, store, and sell items from traditional retail store locations, and allowing manufacturers and distributors to reach a larger target market at a lower cost and higher margin than by traditional retail locations.
However, despite these advantages, remote shopping has some drawbacks and, among such drawbacks, the lag time between purchasing an item and having it delivered is a major one. Most of the goods purchased by remote shopping need to be delivered to the users at home or at business place and this can take days or longer. Companies are attempting to minimize the delay between purchase and delivery by offering same day delivery in certain cities. However, this can be very costly and inefficient as it requires a large number of individuals on call to go out and deliver items as they are purchased.
One of the emerging methods in improved delivery service that does not have the draw backs of conventional delivery, is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles/drones. Drones can be used to carry and deliver small to medium sized packages, directly to known locations, using global positioning system technology, telemetry, metadata and/or commands from a remote operator. Once purchased, these drones promise to be much more cost effective than human delivery via foot, bike, truck, etc., and will likely be faster as they can bypass traffic and are not limited to following paved roads.
As consumer demand for same day delivery rises, drones will rapidly become a viable technology for many delivery services and companies. However, despite its many advantages, one of the potential problems of using drones to deliver packages is its failure to deliver at a customer controlled address. In a typical urban residential/commercial area, any two customers can have desired delivery locations very close to each other. In certain situations, a specific desired receiving area maybe adjacent to other potential receiving areas, perhaps separated by less than a meter, and drones or other autonomous vehicles may fail to deliver packages accurately at such delivery addresses. The problem with the present day Global Positioning System (GPS) based drone delivery system is that commercially used GPS systems can neither offer the high degree of accuracy that would be required for precise landing of a drone at a delivery address, nor does it provide differentiation between parties at the same address, nor does it provide feedback to the deliverer. Likewise the current coordinate-based delivery systems cannot account for safety and obstruction issues. Even in an area that is easily located via GPS there may be preferred areas within that address that should be avoided for safety or obstacle reasons, such as a children's play area or telephone wires.
On the other hand, the high accuracy navigation systems are very expensive, consume a lot of power and size and, thus, are a hurdle in implementing those systems in commercial utilization of autonomous package delivery system. There are available some other systems and methods for autonomous delivery vehicle navigation which do not require very high initial investment. But such systems need electric power and proper maintenance. For example, some landing zone indicators use electric lights to indicate their location. These indicators consume high amount of electricity and are often accompanied by dedicated generators. Hence, this won't be appropriate for a consumer who does not want to actively maintain his landing zone, or supply it with power. Some landing zone indicators use lasers which also consume much power. This also won't be appropriate for consumers who do not want to actively maintain their landing zone, or supply it with power.
Many delivery services will soon begin adopting the new form of delivery; that is, delivery through autonomous vehicles. But, to revolutionize the autonomous delivery service, it is imperative that the proper infrastructure is developed which enables successful implementation of drone delivery or delivery by other autonomous vehicles. What is needed is a system and method for delivering payloads to a specific location with high accuracy through an inexpensive and easy to use navigation system.